Yearwood, Carl "Rabbit", Part 1

ORAL HISTORY OF CARL “RABBIT” YEARWOOD AND JOHN LAUDERDALE
Tape 1
Interviewed by Bill Sewell, Recreation Parks Director for the City of Oak Ridge
February 27, 1985
Interviewer: Hello, my name is Bill Sewell. I’m the Recreation Parks Director for the City of Oak Ridge in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Today I’m speaking with Carl “Rabbit” Yearwood, former Recreation Parks Director with the City of Oak Ridge, and John Lauderdale, a former Oak Ridger and original Oak Ridger in the early days. Rabbit, how did you acquire the name Rabbit?
Rabbit Yearwood: Well that was just a happenstance when I was a freshman in high school and I might be giving away my age if I tell you it was 1923 but that’s how long I’ve been tagged with it. Didn’t have Tennessee Secondary Schools Athletic Association in those days so there was no restrictions on playing outside and some of the freshman and others on the team got permission from the coach to schedule a couple of independent games out of town, one at Sevierville and one at -?Catoola?-. Now -?Catoola’s?- a little town right out of Lafollette. And whichever place we went first, everybody was putting their nickname on the back of their sweatshirt, you know the old grey sweatshirts we had to furnish for ourselves. I said I’ve got no nickname. What’ll I put on mine? And a good teammate Harry -?Payler?- said put “Rabbit” on it. I guess I used an indelible pencil to put it on there because it stayed with me all through my high school and through college. In 1934, I was 25 years old by that time, and I thought, well, I’m going to Columbus, Georgia to take a job, about time I was getting a little dignity. I’ll get rid of that stupid nickname. I won’t let anybody know what my nickname is. The second day I was making tour of facilities with men that I was going to be working with and a boy from Knoxville walked up behind me, grabbed my hand said, “Rabbit, what the hell you doing way down here?” So since then I’ve just let it run wild and fortunately or unfortunately more people, I guess, know me by Rabbit than they do by Carl.
Interviewer: Well I remember one time you got a letter in the mail and it just said Rabbit.
Mr. Yearwood: Yeah, I’ve gotten a…
Interviewer: And it was delivered to the right person.
Mr. Yearwood: I’ve gotten a few addressed to Robert Yearwood too. They didn’t want to put Rabbit so they just put the closest thing they could think of.
Interviewer: John, did you have nickname when you were growing up?
John Lauderdale: Unfortunately I was never dignified by having a nickname. I don’t remember… One group of young fellows on a survey party for a very short time, called me Curly. I had more hair in those days, but it didn’t stick, and generally I’ve been going through life devoid of a nickname. I’m sorry I can’t furnish you one.
Interviewer: Okay. Rabbit, why did you choose to come to Oak Ridge?
Mr. Yearwood: Well I got involved in the recreation field again by chance in 1929. I started working with some buddies of mine on a spring program that the recreation department in Knoxville was conducting, Junior Olympics type thing, where we went to a school in the afternoon after school and tested boys on certain skills and encouraged them for more fitness. Then Bureau of Recreation Knoxville at that time always had a training institute and you had to attend that institute to apply for a job. You could apply but if you didn’t attend the institute why, you weren’t considered. During that training period everybody had to make some kind of track project, and having had a little background in lettering and all, I chose to make a poster. So Director of Recreation, -?Nathan Malison?- says, “Well, I’m going to hire you so you can come in the office in the morning and make posters for my special events and then you can go to the playground in the afternoon and work the playground program and the softball and horseshoes at night.” It’s just a 14 hour day wasn’t bad for a beginning but I was the highest paid individual on my level of work. I got 55 cents a hour; everybody else just got 50. Then the Director left at the end of the summer season and went to Jacksonville, Florida. The Assistant moved up to his place and his Assistant hired me and another fellow on the staff as his assistants. I was in charge of the athletic program and -?Mondale Anderton?- the other assistant was in charge of the social activities, picnic, parties and those kind of things. Then hard times started hitting and we had some shaky times in Knoxville. We had a program one year, the people, the whole playground staff one summer were on relief programs, where they’d work. They got a dollar and a quarter work shift per day and most any of them got three work shifts a week. Most of them however just got one, but we had one of the greatest playground programs that summer. People didn’t have anything else to do anyway so they just worked regardless of whether they were getting paid or not. We climaxed it by the playground circus and had a parade that was 8 blocks long up the street and charged a big admission of 10 cents and took in $210.
Interviewer: Wow, that’s a lot of money back in those days.
Mr. Yearwood: It was a lot of money. It paid for the entire expenses of putting the circus on. Then it went from one thing to another. I went to Columbus, Georgia with the Georgia Transit Bureau and from there I came back and operated bowling alleys in Knoxville for 5 years. Then I went with TVA. I was with TVA at Fort Loudon for a year and Fontana Dam, in North Atlanta for two years when I came to Oak Ridge, and here I am.
Interviewer: Here you are. And this was in 1945?
Mr. Yearwood: 1945, I came to work on April the 2nd, 1945.
Interviewer: John, what brought you to Oak Ridge?
Mr. Lauderdale: I had been an employee for 14 years of the Corps of Engineers, U.S. Engineer Department, and circulated around quite a bit, two or three years on the Mississippi River, sometimes I lived on a boat and so forth, went to Oklahoma and Southwest and particularly went through New Mexico for a little over two years, I guess, working on a flood control dam at the same time that Norris Dam was being built. I went out there in August 1935 came back to Little Rock District and henceTulsa District which is all in the general southwestern area in 1937 I guess. Late 1940 I had gone to the West Indies where I lived for three years on one of the islands north of Trinidad. Then I went out to Trinidad and returned in 1944, worked a little while in an engineering job and Christmas of 1944 I got in touch with a friend who was here and who knew my work. He was Assistant Project Engineer for one of the projects in what is now the K-25 area and I don’t know whether it was the Gaseous Diffusion Plant he was working on or one of the other two plants but anyway he said come on up, they’re hiring everybody they can find with any background in engineering and so forth. He said Swift Davis is here and he’s looking for some help in an organization he just set up and I’m sure he be glad to get you, and he get you more working for the government. So I came up and talked with him and I think I went to work on January 1st, 1945, worked a little over two years for that organization and then several other including Roane Anderson for awhile and Red Bank Engineering for awhile. In 1949 I went to work in -?Maxing?- Construction Company employed there 6 years and then went with Union Carbide in late 1954, retired in 1975 from Union Carbide.
Interviewer: This question is to both of you. When you arrived in 1945, and of course naturally you’ve lived here 25 or 30 years, was it difficult to raise a family in this town? Rabbit? John?
Mr. Yearwood: No, I think it was rather easy to raise a family. The facilities were here to, the hospital facilities were here, to start a family or help start a family but they did a tremendous job. Recreation and Welfare Association was providing all types of recreation for the young and also operated nurseries for the working mothers to leave their children during the daytime. I think there were probably three or four such nurseries. And the social recreation activity at recreation centers had Ridge Recreation Hall, we had a teen center up in Jackson Square, had Grove Center Recreation Center, Jefferson Recreation Center.
John Lauderdale: Don’t forget Midtown.
Mr. Yearwood: Midtown Recreation Center.
Interviewer: Midtown is where the Civic Center is located today.
Mr. Yearwood: That’s right. It’s right in that general location.
Interviewer: And for the purpose of identification, now the teen center that you spoke of in Jackson Square, that was at the old Ridge Hall where the Executive Seminar Center…
Mr. Yearwood: No, the first Teen Center that I visited when I came here was operated in the corner where, I don’t know what’s in there now, but there was an interior decorating shop in that area. And it wasn’t there long because it wasn’t shortly after that, that they organized the Wildcat Den. And of course we had teen activities. Roane Anderson had some recreation centers, one which is now the Senior Center in Oak Ridge, was originally a center for the people who lived in the trailers in and around the area where the municipal building is and where the Oak Ridge Associated Universities and the High School, all that were trailer and hutment areas. So they had recreation center there, which was the best that they could offer and operated as a junior high age center first and then a senior high center and operated a senior high center in the old central cafeteria building at Jackson Square, until we moved it to the Den, the Wildcat Den building. There was a peculiarity about the Recreation and Welfare Association. It was designated by the people on the Hill you might say, the Manhattan District Engineers, any group that wanted to organize for any purpose had to make application for such an organization through the Recreation and Welfare Association. The Recreation and Welfare Association if it thought it was justified, presented it to the officials in the administration, and if they approved it, why then we provided for their meeting place and such.
Mr. Lauderdale: I might interject, again…
Interviewer: Okay.
Mr. Lauderdale: But this was a security measure because every group that wanted to assemble, they had to have official sanction though because of the security regulation. Believe me security was observed here and I don’t think there was any evidence of any activity in a democratic society that was a better kept secret than this the secrets…
Mr. Yearwood: Pretty well indoctrinated you in those days…
Mr. Lauderdale: You went through indoctrination and coached and so forth…reminded with the periodic lectures and so forth that you weren’t supposed to talk about and surmise and discuss with other people, and just remain silent on this and we’ll let you know in due course
Interviewer: So you could live right next door to your neighbor and not know what he or she did?
Mr. Lauderdale: Not know at all what he did.
Mr. Yearwood: I talked last evening with a man in the parking lot at the lodge hall over in Harriman. We just bumped into each other and got to talking, and he worked at Oak Ridge, he got to telling me how he worked side by side with a man, never knowing anything about him except his name on his tag and that they were working and doing the same thing, until one day the man’s wallet popped out of his pocket and it plopped open like that and it turned out to be a FBI man. And the FBI man swore him to secrecy right then that he would never let anybody know that he saw that. So you didn’t even know. Now the first lady that I employed, for one of the centers, we did have a school, after school program going on in most of the schools, but I didn’t have one at Elm Grove, and the first one I hired was for Elm Grove. She happened to be an experienced recreator from California. So she went around her normal training and started canvassing the neighborhood to find out how many children were in the vicinity. The next morning the telephone rang and I answered it and the voice on the other end said, what’s this lady going around Elm Grove area, going from door to door, asking so many questions? Well she’s the new Recreation Director at the center out there and she’s canvassing to see how many children and what ages and all and she’ll plan a program for them. “Well stop it!” And we stopped it. You don’t know how many instances just like that, took place. I mean you, I guess I was well indoctrinated because I’d been knowing people ever since those days and I’ve never even asked them what they did.
Interviewer: John, how about you? How do you, how was it with you to raise a family in those days?
Mr. Lauderdale: Oh I raised three children, one at a time, you might say. They were 5 ½ years apart but they just grew on up. And I consider that we had a lot of advantages I think here in Oak Ridge that we didn’t have, that other people didn’t have during the same period in many other places. So I don’t consider that the family production was any difficulty here.
Mr. Yearwood: Right from those early days, Oak Ridge has been recognized for its tip-top education system. So as far as raising your children through the schools, each school playground was equipped with the finest recreation equipment that could be and it’s still there. I mean, it had to be the finest or it wouldn’t still be there today serving the same purpose it did in 1945, ‘44, ‘45.
Interviewer: That’s amazing that you mention that. All of Oak Ridge of course was only supposed to last for 5 years and we see the evidence of all over Oak Ridge, like the playground equipment that was established back in the early days in the ‘40s, and they’re still there and it’s functioning well.
Mr. Yearwood: Of course all the material that was purchased and the equipment, which is still in use in the schools, was metal equipment and the schools have taken good care of it, maintained it and kept it in good repair. Now there were other recreational facilities that were provided, and these were Tot Lots, and in every place there was a shade tree and a group of houses or surroundings that shade tree, there was a Tot Lot consisting of a form having two swings, a chinning bar on one end and two seesaws on the other end and a sandbox and a bench for Mama to sit on. And there were 125 of these located in or around the residential area. So everybody had those. In addition to that there were picnic areas within the greenbelts all the way from Ashland playground to the extreme west, as far as the west went at that time. The picnic tables were in there, the fireplaces were in there. Right back of us over here in one of those trailer camps was a picnic area with a shelter, ovens and we had playgrounds over there for a couple years, as long as the trailer camp was still there. And when they started to put this present shelter out there, they got to looking around and they found one of the concrete fire pits that was there in the original days of Oak Ridge. Nevertheless, back in those days you didn’t buy rubber home plates where you bought, then you made wooden plates. And we made some pretty good ones then and we painted them white entirely. And, shortly after there used to be a baseball field right up where the museum is, and shortly after we had moved into the new municipal building, and found that the back parking lot wasn’t sufficient and they started to build an addition to the back parking lot. I was in my truck with one of my workers and we rode by and where they had grated the bank off, one of the white home plates fell out, and I knew what it was, see. He didn’t. I said yeah there’s one of my home plates back there. Run back there and get that. He came back and said, Oh it was an old, white wooden home plate. I think that the Recreation and Welfare Association, as far as leisure time was concerned, did as complete a job. We had to. People were, in by, 75,000 people, were in behind a chain link fence and they couldn’t get out without proper identification or couldn’t get back in without proper identification. Gasoline was the premium. We couldn’t get out and go joy riding, so they were captive audiences. And as a consequence, everywhere we had playground, we had a young population of a lot of children and recreation centers filled with young adults, no old adults. I mean if you saw a man as old as me and John walking down the street he was some kind of a freak, you know but…
Interviewer: he follow as ????
Mr. Yearwood: but then the school system and the hospitalization system and police and fire systems, it was a model town as far as raising your family was concerned.
Mr. Lauderdale: You speak of all those that Tot Lots and so forth, remember that all those, the number you mention there, that went in essentially what is now the cemestos housing area.
Mr. Yearwood: Yeah, that’s going right up the back of my house on ???? Road.
Mr. Lauderdale: And we didn’t have all these West Village, you know the west end and Emory Valley and all that stuff of course wasn’t developed, so what he said was concentrated in a relatively small area.
Interviewer: You know you mention the cemesto, I need to tell you this little tale. I was in California back in 1970 and I was driving down the freeway and this advertisement came on the radio, and they were talking about a new building material that was just sweeping the countryside. And I was interested in that, and I kept listening to the radio. It finally came out that it was cemesto sweeping the country in California. Of course we had had a cemesto houses in 1940 in Oak Ridge, and that sort of tickled me. We were talking a few minutes ago about the age of Oak Ridge and both of you arrived here about in 1945 and ironically this year, in 1985, we will be celebrating the 40th anniversary of one of the nicest recreation facilities that we’ve had in Oak Ridge, and probably still one of the nicest in the southeast, and that’s our Municipal outdoor swimming pool. I know that both of you were heavily involved in the early days of the municipal swimming pool and John, I guess you were in the design and the construction end of that. Could you talk a little bit about the early municipal swimming pool?
Mr. Lauderdale: I was interested, participated in writing this specification for the contract to build the school. I didn’t design it…[break in tape]… and the piping system was designed by Mr. Milo Martin who was an employee of, I believe, Tennessee Eastman Corporation. And John A. Johnson Company of New York City was the contractor that took the contract. It was built with very little supervision. If there had been an inspector, I guess it would have been I, and I did very little. I was entirely engaged in other things, and this was built in 1945. Now when it was concreted and put in operation there was no filter plant to go with it. The site had been occupied, I was told, the previous year, as Carl has mentioned, the need for all kinds of recreation was so desperate they activated what had been, I thought, a pond.
Mr. Yearwood: Manmade lake, yeah.
Mr. Lauderdale: Yes, it was somehow arranged. Now, recent conversation with some of the residents from that area there, and I was told that it wasn’t a pond, it was a, they determined, a part of a spring. The spring, now there might be a spring under that pool, but the main spring, that I have always thought of, was outside and flowed into it. But they use as a swimming hole you might say. They tried to keep it, with some help, activities by loading it with…
Mr. Yearwood: Chlorine?
Mr. Lauderdale: Calcium hydrochlorite, in large quantities dumped this into there, well of course the filth in the pool, and stirring up the bottom and so forth, solved the immediate in short order and it wasn’t a sanitary pool, I’m sure they used it as a swimming pool. And also, the year 1945 activities, after it was concreted, we had no filtration plant, so therefore it was impossible to keep the chlorine up to standards. It got pretty green with time as season was over so that….
Mr. Yearwood: Well our system at that time, Bill, was we bought liquid chlorine by the gallon jug. And we had a row boat and one lifeguard, with a pair of swim fins, would swim along and pull the row boat and another lifeguard, sitting on the back of the boat, would pour in the chlorine as we went along, as soon as they got through traversing back and forth they’d take another reading at the starting point, and it’s almost time to put chlorine in again. So it’s almost a constant operation to keep it chlorinated. Of course, as John says, it wasn’t the most effective method, but it was a method which served its purpose at that time. Now the reason that we had no chlorination system, we had everything except the valves, necessary valves, because we, just like everything that went on in Oak Ridge at that time, had number one priority to anything that Oak Ridge needed. So, and that’s one reason that you see three different distinct types of filter tanks at the swimming pool. We couldn’t get all of the standard….
[Side 2]
Interviewer: I’m talking with Carl “Rabbit” Yearwood, former Recreation Director for the City of Oak Ridge and John Lauderdale, a long time Oak Ridger, who was very instrumental in the construction days of the City of Oak Ridge, as well and the Municipal Swimming Pool. Today is February 27, 1985. Rabbit, you were talking about the filters, would you like to continue with that?
Mr. Yearwood: Yeah, well since we turned that tape, John kind of corrected me a little bit and I stand corrected. I know that we didn’t have a filter system in operation that first year. Since he mentioned it, I can’t visualize any tank sitting over there. And I know that the main reason that the program hadn’t gone in as soon as it should have, the filtration, was that the valves were missing, and it took us until the next swimming season to get the tanks in place and the valves. Correct me further John.
Mr. Lauderdale: As I commented earlier, the piping system was designed by Milo Martin, and he was an employee in the Y-12 area. And these International Filter Company the, INCO filters, six of them, were in buildings there, and I don’t know the numbers of them, but they were put in as supplemental filters or in-line filters with the water that the Y-12 plant was using from the filtration plant, which was completed then, and still exists as the water supply plant for Oak Ridge and to the plants. Those filters were running in sequence you might say, with the main filter plant, and having run them for several months, they experimented by backwashing, then one day, they got no pressure drop through them and they backwashed them and they got nothing out of them, so they, obviously they didn’t need them. And so Milo Martin helped scavenge them out of the operation of the plants. They weren’t needed there so he got them for the swimming pool. When they analyzed the, made the calculations for the filter surface necessary to take care of the volume of water that they had to turn over for one time a day, or whatever it was to meet the minimum standard, they were still short of filter space. And they didn’t have any others to scavenge, so they got those two tanks and I put concrete in the bottom of them made of cinders from the old steam plant down on the Turnpike there, hand sifted the cinders to get the ashes out of them and made as best I could, low-strength concrete to put in the bottom and bought the nozzles and had the pipes made up to make the filters out of those tanks. Now one of them, we found, could get a lot more surface by laying it horizontal and that’s the reason one is horizontal and one is vertical. The vertical one is not long enough to get more area out of laying it horizontal.
Interviewer: Do you remember the turnover rate that you were achieving back in those days?
Mr. Lauderdale: No I don’t remember. It seems to me that, I think that, the volume of that pool is about 2 ½ million gallons, isn’t it?
Interviewer: 2.1 I think they calculated, 2.1million.
Mr. Lauderdale: That would, it seems to me that there was a one-a-day or two-a-day or something like that, turnover in the total volume, total capacity of the filters there. We got, made velocity measurements in the discharge. I remember we got one motor for, I think there’s just one large motor in the pit there, isn’t?
Interviewer: We have two now.
Mr. Lauderdale: Do you?
Interviewer: Two motors.
Mr. Lauderdale: Did you put a second one in after...
Mr. Yearwood: No, it was several years after that, that we put in the second.
Mr. Lauderdale: Okay. But it started out with one motor I think, and that was requisitioned by the government from Huntsville Ordinance Works and since shipped up here by mobile freight I think. I remember that particular thing because we believed it was supposed to ship it in order freight, and they shipped it LCL rail freight and we had to wait a long time. We got the chlorine injection apparatus set in it and I went down, I was down there by myself one night, foolishly went down into the pit there and got some chlorine poisoning. And I spent a night in the hospital under an oxygen tent. Didn’t get any lasting injury out of it, but it was a silly thing to do, because I went down when I was there alone trying to adjust something in the injection chlorine or something like that and it had a leak in it I think and anyway….
Interviewer: I think you’re talking about the dry well as we refer to it now. I think I remember a time that when the pool completely flooded, the hillside washed down into the pool, and we had to drain it and clean it out and so forth. We had to change the screen and that’s where the screens were located, down at the bottom of that drywell and it was completely filled with water. And we had to go down and change the screen, and you couldn’t see your face in front of your, hand in front of your face with a mask on, and Rabbit probably remembers those days.
Mr. Yearwood: I remember, you and I were the only one down there one night. You were doing the dive and I was doing the praying.
Interviewer: That was an unreal experience. A question about the irregular shape size of that facility, that’s a 2.1million gallon facility, I had entered a competition so to speak. I challenged the rest of the country, at one time, that we had the largest 14-sided pool in the world, and I didn’t get any takers. Do you know why we have such an irregular shaped size pool?
Mr. Lauderdale: The shape was primarily made to fit the hole and Harper saw the possibility of getting a one hundred meter course through it, for, he visualized the uses for competition, and he set the platform over 25 meters from the straight-away aim of the, from the side by the diving board, and the other course was a little less excavation, we got the 100 meters, and so it was made to fit the hole that was already there. There was very little excavation.
Mr. Yearwood: Well, that was another reason to fit the hole to avoid evacuation I mean,
Mr. Lauderdale: excavation
Mr. Yearwood: if they’d made it smaller they would have had to bring in a lot of dirt to fill in and they just didn’t believe in moving dirt in those days, I mean. If the hill was there, go around it, if the hole’s there, use it.
Interviewer: Could you, was the spring then, the spring that we’re presently using now to feed the water as our primary water source, was any calculation done back in those days as to the origin of that spring or the reliability of that spring?
Mr. Lauderdale: No, the spring had been there quite a while. Well it was there, it existed, and I don’t know that any effort was ever made to discover the source of that water.
Mr. Yearwood: No, not at that time. We did, at that time, use it as partial replenishment water. In other words we had a pump and a cylinder of chlorine right there and pumped the water up into a pipe out into the pool and it used to be a lot of fun for the kids to get under that pipe with the cold water coming out. But, in later years, and I forget just what year, that they were, but there were years when Colonel Britton, Bill Britton was Civil Defense Director. He envisioned making the swimming pool a reserve water supply in case of crisis. At that time a study was made and they came up with one or two days in the year that the spring wouldn’t furnish that much water. So on the basis that it wasn’t 100%, they turned the proposition down. However, a few years after that, the good old gentleman’s gone now, so they can’t punish him for it, but we wanted to use, well it was when we transferred our operation from Office of Community Affairs to Management Services Incorporated, that the head of the department that was over the municipal operations discovered that the city water bill for the swimming pool was tremendous and he was determined to pipe the water around and run it through the filter system and use water from the spring as purified water not just direct. So being a policy that any work order that went over $2,000 had to be sent to the Hill for approval we dug a ditch for $1,995. We laid the pipeline for $1,995 and we backfilled and landscaped for $1,995. It was quite a number of years after that.
Interviewer: I think that practice is still going on.
Mr. Yearwood: That an official noticed our building over the spring. The fence had covered with vines, had covered that building, and for this official, we took all the vines off, and the official all of a sudden realized that there was something over there under a shelter and what was it? That’s the spring that we get the water from. But just like getting the pieces to fit them together to make the swimming pool we fit the pieces together to make it more effective.
Interviewer: A couple of years ago we were noticing, the Recreation Department was noticing, that we were losing about 140 thousand gallons of water a day and naturally over a little over an acre of surface area you’re going to have quite a bit of evaporation and you’re also going to have spillage, splashing for the kids, but we were still losing a considerable amount of water and it was calculated that we were losing about 140,000 a day. Do you know what the make up of the bottom of that pool might be even today? Do you?
Mr. Lauderdale: No, I have no recent knowledge and I really didn’t do any study for the original pool, so as Carl said, I’m confident that in 1945, when we filled the pool we just filled it out of the water main of the city, the government was buying all of it, the government owned everything….
Mr. Yearwood: That’s right, in other words, the water main’s was, I mean cut off valve is up on the street right above…
Mr. Lauderdale: I don’t know that we even used any water out of the spring the first year.
Mr. Yearwood: Yeah we did because I had to go down and manage the pool and from the first of August on….
Mr. Lauderdale: And you were taking water out of the spring…
Mr. Yearwood: Yeah we used some water.
Mr. Lauderdale: Okay.
Mr. Yearwood: But whatever water the spring was providing, well, we ran into the pool.
Mr. Lauderdale: Well we, I have always assumed that the bottom of the pool was possibly on Tennessee clay or ordinary soil such as you find on a hillside and so forth here. The bottom of the concrete section of it was scattered with a rock base for the slabs and left seams in the slabs so that the water could soak down and just anticipated taking the loss whatever the seepage was. Now some of the, in talking to some of these older people, and all of them are women, who lived in that area that fellow, who owned that house. Mr. Cross, yeah, Ethel Cross.
Mr. Yearwood: Ethel Cross.
Mr. Lauderdale: He had a I think someone, I think Mr. Norton, lived in it and managed his farm or something and Mr. Queener.
Mr. Yearwood: He had a log cabin down right next to the big spring
Mr. Lauderdale: Well now she says…
Mr. Yearwood: I don’t know who lived in that or whether it was a summer resort, or…
Mr. Lauderdale: No I think these people that lived there worked for Mr. Cross and so forth and they thought that that was a deep bottomless pit there. I mean I think they’re somewhat…
Mr. Yearwood: No since you brought that up it reminds me of my observation through the years and it backs it up. My, from some other source, I had learned that the pool was built below the water level, and anytime that I remember, if you got the water down to zero you had water coming up through the cracks.
Mr. Lauderdale: Well right.
Mr. Yearwood: Now, if that waters coming up through the cracks, its got to have somewhere to go or its going to float the concrete pool
Mr. Lauderdale: Right.
Mr. Yearwood: So I never worried about that water coming in.
Mr. Lauderdale: That was the reason for leaving the openings of the pouring of slabs in segments, with openings between them was to keep that from, and if you pump that down, I believe we have pumped it down. Lets see, I had practically nothing to do with operation of the pool once that filter plant was completed, but I think if you pump it dry, it will fill up over the winter, back to a certain level, about four feet below the skimmers.
Mr. Yearwood: Back to where the holes were in the wall, and the water down to that level would seep out through the holes in the wall in the….
Mr. Lauderdale: okay
Mr. Yearwood: You know in the…
Mr. Lauderdale: You know, much more about that than I did, because I had nothing to do with operation.
Mr. Yearwood: Yeah, I had to worry with it for 22 years.
Mr. Lauderdale: I know that, the purpose for, the reason for building the pool with the open bottom was to keep the slabs from floating if it got below the creek level.
Interviewer: Well even to today, if we still have a heavy winter, heavy rainy winter, the water table is extremely high and when we drain the pool in the spring we see indications of the water coming back through the cracks in the bottom of the pool.
Mr. Yearwood: It’s a…question that I think that has to be because if you have to close that pool in to where it can’t drain back in, you’re going to have to make some provision for pumping that water out before it -????- back.
Interviewer: That’s a good point.
Mr. Yearwood: I never considered it. I never thought about it being a spring or a series of springs down there. I thought that it was for some reason that this other spring up above it was seeping water down and it’s coming up and this might be it but….
Mr. Lauderdale: It is in the flow line of the original creek, I think, that ran out of that spring. I think the original stream that was there before the pool was built ran through that same area.
Mr. Yearwood: I’m sure it did.
Mr. Lauderdale: Yeah so it would naturally fill up…
Interviewer: We used to have hot water there at the outdoor pool did we not, many years ago?
Mr. Yearwood: Yeah and for reasons we had hot water and nobody ever used it. We never forced anybody to, the only time we ever forced anybody to go through a shower was when we first opened that pool and we had temporary bath houses at the end where the refreshment stand is now. We had a chute that people had to go through and it was through a cold shower. And it’s a wonder we didn’t have a lot of broken arms and broken legs cause everybody took a deep breath and started running. So really, we ran a community that, had pretty good health practices, health habits and it was a matter of having two more people stand and say, you go take a soap shower or you don’t go in the pool or letting them go as they came. Then the Health Department saw no problem with it. Then one year we started to have the boiler repaired it and we were almost in the position of having to purchase another, so officials said just take it out. We took it out and turned it into a guard room, guards change clothes in it. We never had any complaints from anyone that they couldn’t take a shower before going or coming out. Not only did we do away with the hot water, we also did away with the foot bath everybody was suppose to wash cause in the foot bath they were risking life and limb, trying to step around it to keep from stepping into the water. And in addition to that, the grass on their feet, coming in from the beach, and walking through the foot bath, kept that from where at, the foot bath was more apt to cause them a problem than it was for them to cause anybody else a problem. So we concreted it in so people could walk safely from the bath house to the pool.
Interviewer: You might, both of you might have read recently in the Oak Ridger the concern that the City has as far as the future of the municipal pool. We’re experiencing some areas, primarily recirculation, filtration concerns, water loss, high use of chemicals and we’ve just had a consultant look at our facility and give some recommendations to City Council regarding the future of the municipal swimming pool. Do you have any comments about this as far as would you like to see it maintained in its present state, and just refurbish It, or do you think it’s time to maybe redesign it totally? I know I have my own personal feelings but I’d like to hear ya’lls comments on what you might think of the future of the outdoor swimming pool.
Mr. Yearwood: Well having been one of its first managers, supervisors, that’s joking, I had to go down there because Ben Martin had to go to the hospital for an operation but, 22 years of struggling with it myself. I know that the cost has increased year by year but personally I’m in love with the old facility. You can’t be married to something for 22 years without getting some affection for it.
Interviewer: Sure.
Mr. Yearwood: I know that the cost is going to be tremendous. I know that there are a lot of Oak Ridgers who have the same feelings that I do. Perhaps some of the swimming groups, even within the present structure, would like to see some additions made that would offer more possibilities for conducting big swimming meets or having training sessions, but, there’s something about the pool that is just Oak Ridge. And maybe some day everything about Oak Ridge will be erased, I mean, but if we can redesign and redo the present configuration as it is, I would be all for keeping the facility, the present facility, rejuvenated, rather than dividing it up into other areas. I know that if you were going to build a pool today you wouldn’t build one like that. That was built for a particular time and it marks a particular time in the history not only of Oak Ridge but the state of Tennessee and the United States. It’s a part of one of the greatest times that this country has ever been forced to go through and it’s a symbol of if you have to do it, you can do, and we had to do it and it was done. It was built the second day of April, and we opened for business on July the 4th, not completed, had water in it, people happy to get in and take that cold shower and hit it…I realize that you wouldn’t build a pool like that today and wouldn’t have built it like that at the time it was built, except the hole was there lets fill it up with concrete and put water in it, without having to haul all this dirt in to fill around.
Interviewer: So your vote is to keep it like it is? As much as possible?
Mr. Yearwood: Yeah, that’s what I… Of course I’m prejudiced.
Interviewer: John, very briefly.
Mr. Lauderdale: Well I of course my association and my thoughts about it now are clouded with nostalgia. I had something to do with it way back when. Since I’m not even a citizen of Oak Ridge now it might be inappropriate for me to try to, and I’m not a pool designer and so forth. It was built for a situation that existed at that time and I would have to concede to present day malices of the economics and so forth of the project. I would say that I think that if you built a pool today of the size that could be supported by public subscription to it, public use and so forth, I would think that those filters and maybe some of the equipment and so forth around there could be used. Now I read that the -????- frames said they’d have to scrap all that and I would have to know for sure whether they would make any money by scrapping and buying their stuff, because we’re still using the same filters over yonder in the water plant on the hill that was used at that time. And I suspect that those in so far as they are worth something as filters, they might be large enough to take a smaller pool that could be supported with it. Certainly, you don’t have the, you don’t have the population here that was there then. Many people all over town have swimming pools and have said let the neighbors use and so forth that they won’t pay the admission fees for the pool, so I think my comments are just not worth anything.
Interviewer: John, I want to thank you for coming this afternoon and Rabbit for sharing some ideas and comments with us. Again this is February 27, 1985 and we’ve been talking to John Lauderdale and Carl “Rabbit” Yearwood. Thank you both for coming down.
Transcribed: November 2005
Typed by LB

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ORAL HISTORY OF CARL “RABBIT” YEARWOOD AND JOHN LAUDERDALE
Tape 1
Interviewed by Bill Sewell, Recreation Parks Director for the City of Oak Ridge
February 27, 1985
Interviewer: Hello, my name is Bill Sewell. I’m the Recreation Parks Director for the City of Oak Ridge in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Today I’m speaking with Carl “Rabbit” Yearwood, former Recreation Parks Director with the City of Oak Ridge, and John Lauderdale, a former Oak Ridger and original Oak Ridger in the early days. Rabbit, how did you acquire the name Rabbit?
Rabbit Yearwood: Well that was just a happenstance when I was a freshman in high school and I might be giving away my age if I tell you it was 1923 but that’s how long I’ve been tagged with it. Didn’t have Tennessee Secondary Schools Athletic Association in those days so there was no restrictions on playing outside and some of the freshman and others on the team got permission from the coach to schedule a couple of independent games out of town, one at Sevierville and one at -?Catoola?-. Now -?Catoola’s?- a little town right out of Lafollette. And whichever place we went first, everybody was putting their nickname on the back of their sweatshirt, you know the old grey sweatshirts we had to furnish for ourselves. I said I’ve got no nickname. What’ll I put on mine? And a good teammate Harry -?Payler?- said put “Rabbit” on it. I guess I used an indelible pencil to put it on there because it stayed with me all through my high school and through college. In 1934, I was 25 years old by that time, and I thought, well, I’m going to Columbus, Georgia to take a job, about time I was getting a little dignity. I’ll get rid of that stupid nickname. I won’t let anybody know what my nickname is. The second day I was making tour of facilities with men that I was going to be working with and a boy from Knoxville walked up behind me, grabbed my hand said, “Rabbit, what the hell you doing way down here?” So since then I’ve just let it run wild and fortunately or unfortunately more people, I guess, know me by Rabbit than they do by Carl.
Interviewer: Well I remember one time you got a letter in the mail and it just said Rabbit.
Mr. Yearwood: Yeah, I’ve gotten a…
Interviewer: And it was delivered to the right person.
Mr. Yearwood: I’ve gotten a few addressed to Robert Yearwood too. They didn’t want to put Rabbit so they just put the closest thing they could think of.
Interviewer: John, did you have nickname when you were growing up?
John Lauderdale: Unfortunately I was never dignified by having a nickname. I don’t remember… One group of young fellows on a survey party for a very short time, called me Curly. I had more hair in those days, but it didn’t stick, and generally I’ve been going through life devoid of a nickname. I’m sorry I can’t furnish you one.
Interviewer: Okay. Rabbit, why did you choose to come to Oak Ridge?
Mr. Yearwood: Well I got involved in the recreation field again by chance in 1929. I started working with some buddies of mine on a spring program that the recreation department in Knoxville was conducting, Junior Olympics type thing, where we went to a school in the afternoon after school and tested boys on certain skills and encouraged them for more fitness. Then Bureau of Recreation Knoxville at that time always had a training institute and you had to attend that institute to apply for a job. You could apply but if you didn’t attend the institute why, you weren’t considered. During that training period everybody had to make some kind of track project, and having had a little background in lettering and all, I chose to make a poster. So Director of Recreation, -?Nathan Malison?- says, “Well, I’m going to hire you so you can come in the office in the morning and make posters for my special events and then you can go to the playground in the afternoon and work the playground program and the softball and horseshoes at night.” It’s just a 14 hour day wasn’t bad for a beginning but I was the highest paid individual on my level of work. I got 55 cents a hour; everybody else just got 50. Then the Director left at the end of the summer season and went to Jacksonville, Florida. The Assistant moved up to his place and his Assistant hired me and another fellow on the staff as his assistants. I was in charge of the athletic program and -?Mondale Anderton?- the other assistant was in charge of the social activities, picnic, parties and those kind of things. Then hard times started hitting and we had some shaky times in Knoxville. We had a program one year, the people, the whole playground staff one summer were on relief programs, where they’d work. They got a dollar and a quarter work shift per day and most any of them got three work shifts a week. Most of them however just got one, but we had one of the greatest playground programs that summer. People didn’t have anything else to do anyway so they just worked regardless of whether they were getting paid or not. We climaxed it by the playground circus and had a parade that was 8 blocks long up the street and charged a big admission of 10 cents and took in $210.
Interviewer: Wow, that’s a lot of money back in those days.
Mr. Yearwood: It was a lot of money. It paid for the entire expenses of putting the circus on. Then it went from one thing to another. I went to Columbus, Georgia with the Georgia Transit Bureau and from there I came back and operated bowling alleys in Knoxville for 5 years. Then I went with TVA. I was with TVA at Fort Loudon for a year and Fontana Dam, in North Atlanta for two years when I came to Oak Ridge, and here I am.
Interviewer: Here you are. And this was in 1945?
Mr. Yearwood: 1945, I came to work on April the 2nd, 1945.
Interviewer: John, what brought you to Oak Ridge?
Mr. Lauderdale: I had been an employee for 14 years of the Corps of Engineers, U.S. Engineer Department, and circulated around quite a bit, two or three years on the Mississippi River, sometimes I lived on a boat and so forth, went to Oklahoma and Southwest and particularly went through New Mexico for a little over two years, I guess, working on a flood control dam at the same time that Norris Dam was being built. I went out there in August 1935 came back to Little Rock District and henceTulsa District which is all in the general southwestern area in 1937 I guess. Late 1940 I had gone to the West Indies where I lived for three years on one of the islands north of Trinidad. Then I went out to Trinidad and returned in 1944, worked a little while in an engineering job and Christmas of 1944 I got in touch with a friend who was here and who knew my work. He was Assistant Project Engineer for one of the projects in what is now the K-25 area and I don’t know whether it was the Gaseous Diffusion Plant he was working on or one of the other two plants but anyway he said come on up, they’re hiring everybody they can find with any background in engineering and so forth. He said Swift Davis is here and he’s looking for some help in an organization he just set up and I’m sure he be glad to get you, and he get you more working for the government. So I came up and talked with him and I think I went to work on January 1st, 1945, worked a little over two years for that organization and then several other including Roane Anderson for awhile and Red Bank Engineering for awhile. In 1949 I went to work in -?Maxing?- Construction Company employed there 6 years and then went with Union Carbide in late 1954, retired in 1975 from Union Carbide.
Interviewer: This question is to both of you. When you arrived in 1945, and of course naturally you’ve lived here 25 or 30 years, was it difficult to raise a family in this town? Rabbit? John?
Mr. Yearwood: No, I think it was rather easy to raise a family. The facilities were here to, the hospital facilities were here, to start a family or help start a family but they did a tremendous job. Recreation and Welfare Association was providing all types of recreation for the young and also operated nurseries for the working mothers to leave their children during the daytime. I think there were probably three or four such nurseries. And the social recreation activity at recreation centers had Ridge Recreation Hall, we had a teen center up in Jackson Square, had Grove Center Recreation Center, Jefferson Recreation Center.
John Lauderdale: Don’t forget Midtown.
Mr. Yearwood: Midtown Recreation Center.
Interviewer: Midtown is where the Civic Center is located today.
Mr. Yearwood: That’s right. It’s right in that general location.
Interviewer: And for the purpose of identification, now the teen center that you spoke of in Jackson Square, that was at the old Ridge Hall where the Executive Seminar Center…
Mr. Yearwood: No, the first Teen Center that I visited when I came here was operated in the corner where, I don’t know what’s in there now, but there was an interior decorating shop in that area. And it wasn’t there long because it wasn’t shortly after that, that they organized the Wildcat Den. And of course we had teen activities. Roane Anderson had some recreation centers, one which is now the Senior Center in Oak Ridge, was originally a center for the people who lived in the trailers in and around the area where the municipal building is and where the Oak Ridge Associated Universities and the High School, all that were trailer and hutment areas. So they had recreation center there, which was the best that they could offer and operated as a junior high age center first and then a senior high center and operated a senior high center in the old central cafeteria building at Jackson Square, until we moved it to the Den, the Wildcat Den building. There was a peculiarity about the Recreation and Welfare Association. It was designated by the people on the Hill you might say, the Manhattan District Engineers, any group that wanted to organize for any purpose had to make application for such an organization through the Recreation and Welfare Association. The Recreation and Welfare Association if it thought it was justified, presented it to the officials in the administration, and if they approved it, why then we provided for their meeting place and such.
Mr. Lauderdale: I might interject, again…
Interviewer: Okay.
Mr. Lauderdale: But this was a security measure because every group that wanted to assemble, they had to have official sanction though because of the security regulation. Believe me security was observed here and I don’t think there was any evidence of any activity in a democratic society that was a better kept secret than this the secrets…
Mr. Yearwood: Pretty well indoctrinated you in those days…
Mr. Lauderdale: You went through indoctrination and coached and so forth…reminded with the periodic lectures and so forth that you weren’t supposed to talk about and surmise and discuss with other people, and just remain silent on this and we’ll let you know in due course
Interviewer: So you could live right next door to your neighbor and not know what he or she did?
Mr. Lauderdale: Not know at all what he did.
Mr. Yearwood: I talked last evening with a man in the parking lot at the lodge hall over in Harriman. We just bumped into each other and got to talking, and he worked at Oak Ridge, he got to telling me how he worked side by side with a man, never knowing anything about him except his name on his tag and that they were working and doing the same thing, until one day the man’s wallet popped out of his pocket and it plopped open like that and it turned out to be a FBI man. And the FBI man swore him to secrecy right then that he would never let anybody know that he saw that. So you didn’t even know. Now the first lady that I employed, for one of the centers, we did have a school, after school program going on in most of the schools, but I didn’t have one at Elm Grove, and the first one I hired was for Elm Grove. She happened to be an experienced recreator from California. So she went around her normal training and started canvassing the neighborhood to find out how many children were in the vicinity. The next morning the telephone rang and I answered it and the voice on the other end said, what’s this lady going around Elm Grove area, going from door to door, asking so many questions? Well she’s the new Recreation Director at the center out there and she’s canvassing to see how many children and what ages and all and she’ll plan a program for them. “Well stop it!” And we stopped it. You don’t know how many instances just like that, took place. I mean you, I guess I was well indoctrinated because I’d been knowing people ever since those days and I’ve never even asked them what they did.
Interviewer: John, how about you? How do you, how was it with you to raise a family in those days?
Mr. Lauderdale: Oh I raised three children, one at a time, you might say. They were 5 ½ years apart but they just grew on up. And I consider that we had a lot of advantages I think here in Oak Ridge that we didn’t have, that other people didn’t have during the same period in many other places. So I don’t consider that the family production was any difficulty here.
Mr. Yearwood: Right from those early days, Oak Ridge has been recognized for its tip-top education system. So as far as raising your children through the schools, each school playground was equipped with the finest recreation equipment that could be and it’s still there. I mean, it had to be the finest or it wouldn’t still be there today serving the same purpose it did in 1945, ‘44, ‘45.
Interviewer: That’s amazing that you mention that. All of Oak Ridge of course was only supposed to last for 5 years and we see the evidence of all over Oak Ridge, like the playground equipment that was established back in the early days in the ‘40s, and they’re still there and it’s functioning well.
Mr. Yearwood: Of course all the material that was purchased and the equipment, which is still in use in the schools, was metal equipment and the schools have taken good care of it, maintained it and kept it in good repair. Now there were other recreational facilities that were provided, and these were Tot Lots, and in every place there was a shade tree and a group of houses or surroundings that shade tree, there was a Tot Lot consisting of a form having two swings, a chinning bar on one end and two seesaws on the other end and a sandbox and a bench for Mama to sit on. And there were 125 of these located in or around the residential area. So everybody had those. In addition to that there were picnic areas within the greenbelts all the way from Ashland playground to the extreme west, as far as the west went at that time. The picnic tables were in there, the fireplaces were in there. Right back of us over here in one of those trailer camps was a picnic area with a shelter, ovens and we had playgrounds over there for a couple years, as long as the trailer camp was still there. And when they started to put this present shelter out there, they got to looking around and they found one of the concrete fire pits that was there in the original days of Oak Ridge. Nevertheless, back in those days you didn’t buy rubber home plates where you bought, then you made wooden plates. And we made some pretty good ones then and we painted them white entirely. And, shortly after there used to be a baseball field right up where the museum is, and shortly after we had moved into the new municipal building, and found that the back parking lot wasn’t sufficient and they started to build an addition to the back parking lot. I was in my truck with one of my workers and we rode by and where they had grated the bank off, one of the white home plates fell out, and I knew what it was, see. He didn’t. I said yeah there’s one of my home plates back there. Run back there and get that. He came back and said, Oh it was an old, white wooden home plate. I think that the Recreation and Welfare Association, as far as leisure time was concerned, did as complete a job. We had to. People were, in by, 75,000 people, were in behind a chain link fence and they couldn’t get out without proper identification or couldn’t get back in without proper identification. Gasoline was the premium. We couldn’t get out and go joy riding, so they were captive audiences. And as a consequence, everywhere we had playground, we had a young population of a lot of children and recreation centers filled with young adults, no old adults. I mean if you saw a man as old as me and John walking down the street he was some kind of a freak, you know but…
Interviewer: he follow as ????
Mr. Yearwood: but then the school system and the hospitalization system and police and fire systems, it was a model town as far as raising your family was concerned.
Mr. Lauderdale: You speak of all those that Tot Lots and so forth, remember that all those, the number you mention there, that went in essentially what is now the cemestos housing area.
Mr. Yearwood: Yeah, that’s going right up the back of my house on ???? Road.
Mr. Lauderdale: And we didn’t have all these West Village, you know the west end and Emory Valley and all that stuff of course wasn’t developed, so what he said was concentrated in a relatively small area.
Interviewer: You know you mention the cemesto, I need to tell you this little tale. I was in California back in 1970 and I was driving down the freeway and this advertisement came on the radio, and they were talking about a new building material that was just sweeping the countryside. And I was interested in that, and I kept listening to the radio. It finally came out that it was cemesto sweeping the country in California. Of course we had had a cemesto houses in 1940 in Oak Ridge, and that sort of tickled me. We were talking a few minutes ago about the age of Oak Ridge and both of you arrived here about in 1945 and ironically this year, in 1985, we will be celebrating the 40th anniversary of one of the nicest recreation facilities that we’ve had in Oak Ridge, and probably still one of the nicest in the southeast, and that’s our Municipal outdoor swimming pool. I know that both of you were heavily involved in the early days of the municipal swimming pool and John, I guess you were in the design and the construction end of that. Could you talk a little bit about the early municipal swimming pool?
Mr. Lauderdale: I was interested, participated in writing this specification for the contract to build the school. I didn’t design it…[break in tape]… and the piping system was designed by Mr. Milo Martin who was an employee of, I believe, Tennessee Eastman Corporation. And John A. Johnson Company of New York City was the contractor that took the contract. It was built with very little supervision. If there had been an inspector, I guess it would have been I, and I did very little. I was entirely engaged in other things, and this was built in 1945. Now when it was concreted and put in operation there was no filter plant to go with it. The site had been occupied, I was told, the previous year, as Carl has mentioned, the need for all kinds of recreation was so desperate they activated what had been, I thought, a pond.
Mr. Yearwood: Manmade lake, yeah.
Mr. Lauderdale: Yes, it was somehow arranged. Now, recent conversation with some of the residents from that area there, and I was told that it wasn’t a pond, it was a, they determined, a part of a spring. The spring, now there might be a spring under that pool, but the main spring, that I have always thought of, was outside and flowed into it. But they use as a swimming hole you might say. They tried to keep it, with some help, activities by loading it with…
Mr. Yearwood: Chlorine?
Mr. Lauderdale: Calcium hydrochlorite, in large quantities dumped this into there, well of course the filth in the pool, and stirring up the bottom and so forth, solved the immediate in short order and it wasn’t a sanitary pool, I’m sure they used it as a swimming pool. And also, the year 1945 activities, after it was concreted, we had no filtration plant, so therefore it was impossible to keep the chlorine up to standards. It got pretty green with time as season was over so that….
Mr. Yearwood: Well our system at that time, Bill, was we bought liquid chlorine by the gallon jug. And we had a row boat and one lifeguard, with a pair of swim fins, would swim along and pull the row boat and another lifeguard, sitting on the back of the boat, would pour in the chlorine as we went along, as soon as they got through traversing back and forth they’d take another reading at the starting point, and it’s almost time to put chlorine in again. So it’s almost a constant operation to keep it chlorinated. Of course, as John says, it wasn’t the most effective method, but it was a method which served its purpose at that time. Now the reason that we had no chlorination system, we had everything except the valves, necessary valves, because we, just like everything that went on in Oak Ridge at that time, had number one priority to anything that Oak Ridge needed. So, and that’s one reason that you see three different distinct types of filter tanks at the swimming pool. We couldn’t get all of the standard….
[Side 2]
Interviewer: I’m talking with Carl “Rabbit” Yearwood, former Recreation Director for the City of Oak Ridge and John Lauderdale, a long time Oak Ridger, who was very instrumental in the construction days of the City of Oak Ridge, as well and the Municipal Swimming Pool. Today is February 27, 1985. Rabbit, you were talking about the filters, would you like to continue with that?
Mr. Yearwood: Yeah, well since we turned that tape, John kind of corrected me a little bit and I stand corrected. I know that we didn’t have a filter system in operation that first year. Since he mentioned it, I can’t visualize any tank sitting over there. And I know that the main reason that the program hadn’t gone in as soon as it should have, the filtration, was that the valves were missing, and it took us until the next swimming season to get the tanks in place and the valves. Correct me further John.
Mr. Lauderdale: As I commented earlier, the piping system was designed by Milo Martin, and he was an employee in the Y-12 area. And these International Filter Company the, INCO filters, six of them, were in buildings there, and I don’t know the numbers of them, but they were put in as supplemental filters or in-line filters with the water that the Y-12 plant was using from the filtration plant, which was completed then, and still exists as the water supply plant for Oak Ridge and to the plants. Those filters were running in sequence you might say, with the main filter plant, and having run them for several months, they experimented by backwashing, then one day, they got no pressure drop through them and they backwashed them and they got nothing out of them, so they, obviously they didn’t need them. And so Milo Martin helped scavenge them out of the operation of the plants. They weren’t needed there so he got them for the swimming pool. When they analyzed the, made the calculations for the filter surface necessary to take care of the volume of water that they had to turn over for one time a day, or whatever it was to meet the minimum standard, they were still short of filter space. And they didn’t have any others to scavenge, so they got those two tanks and I put concrete in the bottom of them made of cinders from the old steam plant down on the Turnpike there, hand sifted the cinders to get the ashes out of them and made as best I could, low-strength concrete to put in the bottom and bought the nozzles and had the pipes made up to make the filters out of those tanks. Now one of them, we found, could get a lot more surface by laying it horizontal and that’s the reason one is horizontal and one is vertical. The vertical one is not long enough to get more area out of laying it horizontal.
Interviewer: Do you remember the turnover rate that you were achieving back in those days?
Mr. Lauderdale: No I don’t remember. It seems to me that, I think that, the volume of that pool is about 2 ½ million gallons, isn’t it?
Interviewer: 2.1 I think they calculated, 2.1million.
Mr. Lauderdale: That would, it seems to me that there was a one-a-day or two-a-day or something like that, turnover in the total volume, total capacity of the filters there. We got, made velocity measurements in the discharge. I remember we got one motor for, I think there’s just one large motor in the pit there, isn’t?
Interviewer: We have two now.
Mr. Lauderdale: Do you?
Interviewer: Two motors.
Mr. Lauderdale: Did you put a second one in after...
Mr. Yearwood: No, it was several years after that, that we put in the second.
Mr. Lauderdale: Okay. But it started out with one motor I think, and that was requisitioned by the government from Huntsville Ordinance Works and since shipped up here by mobile freight I think. I remember that particular thing because we believed it was supposed to ship it in order freight, and they shipped it LCL rail freight and we had to wait a long time. We got the chlorine injection apparatus set in it and I went down, I was down there by myself one night, foolishly went down into the pit there and got some chlorine poisoning. And I spent a night in the hospital under an oxygen tent. Didn’t get any lasting injury out of it, but it was a silly thing to do, because I went down when I was there alone trying to adjust something in the injection chlorine or something like that and it had a leak in it I think and anyway….
Interviewer: I think you’re talking about the dry well as we refer to it now. I think I remember a time that when the pool completely flooded, the hillside washed down into the pool, and we had to drain it and clean it out and so forth. We had to change the screen and that’s where the screens were located, down at the bottom of that drywell and it was completely filled with water. And we had to go down and change the screen, and you couldn’t see your face in front of your, hand in front of your face with a mask on, and Rabbit probably remembers those days.
Mr. Yearwood: I remember, you and I were the only one down there one night. You were doing the dive and I was doing the praying.
Interviewer: That was an unreal experience. A question about the irregular shape size of that facility, that’s a 2.1million gallon facility, I had entered a competition so to speak. I challenged the rest of the country, at one time, that we had the largest 14-sided pool in the world, and I didn’t get any takers. Do you know why we have such an irregular shaped size pool?
Mr. Lauderdale: The shape was primarily made to fit the hole and Harper saw the possibility of getting a one hundred meter course through it, for, he visualized the uses for competition, and he set the platform over 25 meters from the straight-away aim of the, from the side by the diving board, and the other course was a little less excavation, we got the 100 meters, and so it was made to fit the hole that was already there. There was very little excavation.
Mr. Yearwood: Well, that was another reason to fit the hole to avoid evacuation I mean,
Mr. Lauderdale: excavation
Mr. Yearwood: if they’d made it smaller they would have had to bring in a lot of dirt to fill in and they just didn’t believe in moving dirt in those days, I mean. If the hill was there, go around it, if the hole’s there, use it.
Interviewer: Could you, was the spring then, the spring that we’re presently using now to feed the water as our primary water source, was any calculation done back in those days as to the origin of that spring or the reliability of that spring?
Mr. Lauderdale: No, the spring had been there quite a while. Well it was there, it existed, and I don’t know that any effort was ever made to discover the source of that water.
Mr. Yearwood: No, not at that time. We did, at that time, use it as partial replenishment water. In other words we had a pump and a cylinder of chlorine right there and pumped the water up into a pipe out into the pool and it used to be a lot of fun for the kids to get under that pipe with the cold water coming out. But, in later years, and I forget just what year, that they were, but there were years when Colonel Britton, Bill Britton was Civil Defense Director. He envisioned making the swimming pool a reserve water supply in case of crisis. At that time a study was made and they came up with one or two days in the year that the spring wouldn’t furnish that much water. So on the basis that it wasn’t 100%, they turned the proposition down. However, a few years after that, the good old gentleman’s gone now, so they can’t punish him for it, but we wanted to use, well it was when we transferred our operation from Office of Community Affairs to Management Services Incorporated, that the head of the department that was over the municipal operations discovered that the city water bill for the swimming pool was tremendous and he was determined to pipe the water around and run it through the filter system and use water from the spring as purified water not just direct. So being a policy that any work order that went over $2,000 had to be sent to the Hill for approval we dug a ditch for $1,995. We laid the pipeline for $1,995 and we backfilled and landscaped for $1,995. It was quite a number of years after that.
Interviewer: I think that practice is still going on.
Mr. Yearwood: That an official noticed our building over the spring. The fence had covered with vines, had covered that building, and for this official, we took all the vines off, and the official all of a sudden realized that there was something over there under a shelter and what was it? That’s the spring that we get the water from. But just like getting the pieces to fit them together to make the swimming pool we fit the pieces together to make it more effective.
Interviewer: A couple of years ago we were noticing, the Recreation Department was noticing, that we were losing about 140 thousand gallons of water a day and naturally over a little over an acre of surface area you’re going to have quite a bit of evaporation and you’re also going to have spillage, splashing for the kids, but we were still losing a considerable amount of water and it was calculated that we were losing about 140,000 a day. Do you know what the make up of the bottom of that pool might be even today? Do you?
Mr. Lauderdale: No, I have no recent knowledge and I really didn’t do any study for the original pool, so as Carl said, I’m confident that in 1945, when we filled the pool we just filled it out of the water main of the city, the government was buying all of it, the government owned everything….
Mr. Yearwood: That’s right, in other words, the water main’s was, I mean cut off valve is up on the street right above…
Mr. Lauderdale: I don’t know that we even used any water out of the spring the first year.
Mr. Yearwood: Yeah we did because I had to go down and manage the pool and from the first of August on….
Mr. Lauderdale: And you were taking water out of the spring…
Mr. Yearwood: Yeah we used some water.
Mr. Lauderdale: Okay.
Mr. Yearwood: But whatever water the spring was providing, well, we ran into the pool.
Mr. Lauderdale: Well we, I have always assumed that the bottom of the pool was possibly on Tennessee clay or ordinary soil such as you find on a hillside and so forth here. The bottom of the concrete section of it was scattered with a rock base for the slabs and left seams in the slabs so that the water could soak down and just anticipated taking the loss whatever the seepage was. Now some of the, in talking to some of these older people, and all of them are women, who lived in that area that fellow, who owned that house. Mr. Cross, yeah, Ethel Cross.
Mr. Yearwood: Ethel Cross.
Mr. Lauderdale: He had a I think someone, I think Mr. Norton, lived in it and managed his farm or something and Mr. Queener.
Mr. Yearwood: He had a log cabin down right next to the big spring
Mr. Lauderdale: Well now she says…
Mr. Yearwood: I don’t know who lived in that or whether it was a summer resort, or…
Mr. Lauderdale: No I think these people that lived there worked for Mr. Cross and so forth and they thought that that was a deep bottomless pit there. I mean I think they’re somewhat…
Mr. Yearwood: No since you brought that up it reminds me of my observation through the years and it backs it up. My, from some other source, I had learned that the pool was built below the water level, and anytime that I remember, if you got the water down to zero you had water coming up through the cracks.
Mr. Lauderdale: Well right.
Mr. Yearwood: Now, if that waters coming up through the cracks, its got to have somewhere to go or its going to float the concrete pool
Mr. Lauderdale: Right.
Mr. Yearwood: So I never worried about that water coming in.
Mr. Lauderdale: That was the reason for leaving the openings of the pouring of slabs in segments, with openings between them was to keep that from, and if you pump that down, I believe we have pumped it down. Lets see, I had practically nothing to do with operation of the pool once that filter plant was completed, but I think if you pump it dry, it will fill up over the winter, back to a certain level, about four feet below the skimmers.
Mr. Yearwood: Back to where the holes were in the wall, and the water down to that level would seep out through the holes in the wall in the….
Mr. Lauderdale: okay
Mr. Yearwood: You know in the…
Mr. Lauderdale: You know, much more about that than I did, because I had nothing to do with operation.
Mr. Yearwood: Yeah, I had to worry with it for 22 years.
Mr. Lauderdale: I know that, the purpose for, the reason for building the pool with the open bottom was to keep the slabs from floating if it got below the creek level.
Interviewer: Well even to today, if we still have a heavy winter, heavy rainy winter, the water table is extremely high and when we drain the pool in the spring we see indications of the water coming back through the cracks in the bottom of the pool.
Mr. Yearwood: It’s a…question that I think that has to be because if you have to close that pool in to where it can’t drain back in, you’re going to have to make some provision for pumping that water out before it -????- back.
Interviewer: That’s a good point.
Mr. Yearwood: I never considered it. I never thought about it being a spring or a series of springs down there. I thought that it was for some reason that this other spring up above it was seeping water down and it’s coming up and this might be it but….
Mr. Lauderdale: It is in the flow line of the original creek, I think, that ran out of that spring. I think the original stream that was there before the pool was built ran through that same area.
Mr. Yearwood: I’m sure it did.
Mr. Lauderdale: Yeah so it would naturally fill up…
Interviewer: We used to have hot water there at the outdoor pool did we not, many years ago?
Mr. Yearwood: Yeah and for reasons we had hot water and nobody ever used it. We never forced anybody to, the only time we ever forced anybody to go through a shower was when we first opened that pool and we had temporary bath houses at the end where the refreshment stand is now. We had a chute that people had to go through and it was through a cold shower. And it’s a wonder we didn’t have a lot of broken arms and broken legs cause everybody took a deep breath and started running. So really, we ran a community that, had pretty good health practices, health habits and it was a matter of having two more people stand and say, you go take a soap shower or you don’t go in the pool or letting them go as they came. Then the Health Department saw no problem with it. Then one year we started to have the boiler repaired it and we were almost in the position of having to purchase another, so officials said just take it out. We took it out and turned it into a guard room, guards change clothes in it. We never had any complaints from anyone that they couldn’t take a shower before going or coming out. Not only did we do away with the hot water, we also did away with the foot bath everybody was suppose to wash cause in the foot bath they were risking life and limb, trying to step around it to keep from stepping into the water. And in addition to that, the grass on their feet, coming in from the beach, and walking through the foot bath, kept that from where at, the foot bath was more apt to cause them a problem than it was for them to cause anybody else a problem. So we concreted it in so people could walk safely from the bath house to the pool.
Interviewer: You might, both of you might have read recently in the Oak Ridger the concern that the City has as far as the future of the municipal pool. We’re experiencing some areas, primarily recirculation, filtration concerns, water loss, high use of chemicals and we’ve just had a consultant look at our facility and give some recommendations to City Council regarding the future of the municipal swimming pool. Do you have any comments about this as far as would you like to see it maintained in its present state, and just refurbish It, or do you think it’s time to maybe redesign it totally? I know I have my own personal feelings but I’d like to hear ya’lls comments on what you might think of the future of the outdoor swimming pool.
Mr. Yearwood: Well having been one of its first managers, supervisors, that’s joking, I had to go down there because Ben Martin had to go to the hospital for an operation but, 22 years of struggling with it myself. I know that the cost has increased year by year but personally I’m in love with the old facility. You can’t be married to something for 22 years without getting some affection for it.
Interviewer: Sure.
Mr. Yearwood: I know that the cost is going to be tremendous. I know that there are a lot of Oak Ridgers who have the same feelings that I do. Perhaps some of the swimming groups, even within the present structure, would like to see some additions made that would offer more possibilities for conducting big swimming meets or having training sessions, but, there’s something about the pool that is just Oak Ridge. And maybe some day everything about Oak Ridge will be erased, I mean, but if we can redesign and redo the present configuration as it is, I would be all for keeping the facility, the present facility, rejuvenated, rather than dividing it up into other areas. I know that if you were going to build a pool today you wouldn’t build one like that. That was built for a particular time and it marks a particular time in the history not only of Oak Ridge but the state of Tennessee and the United States. It’s a part of one of the greatest times that this country has ever been forced to go through and it’s a symbol of if you have to do it, you can do, and we had to do it and it was done. It was built the second day of April, and we opened for business on July the 4th, not completed, had water in it, people happy to get in and take that cold shower and hit it…I realize that you wouldn’t build a pool like that today and wouldn’t have built it like that at the time it was built, except the hole was there lets fill it up with concrete and put water in it, without having to haul all this dirt in to fill around.
Interviewer: So your vote is to keep it like it is? As much as possible?
Mr. Yearwood: Yeah, that’s what I… Of course I’m prejudiced.
Interviewer: John, very briefly.
Mr. Lauderdale: Well I of course my association and my thoughts about it now are clouded with nostalgia. I had something to do with it way back when. Since I’m not even a citizen of Oak Ridge now it might be inappropriate for me to try to, and I’m not a pool designer and so forth. It was built for a situation that existed at that time and I would have to concede to present day malices of the economics and so forth of the project. I would say that I think that if you built a pool today of the size that could be supported by public subscription to it, public use and so forth, I would think that those filters and maybe some of the equipment and so forth around there could be used. Now I read that the -????- frames said they’d have to scrap all that and I would have to know for sure whether they would make any money by scrapping and buying their stuff, because we’re still using the same filters over yonder in the water plant on the hill that was used at that time. And I suspect that those in so far as they are worth something as filters, they might be large enough to take a smaller pool that could be supported with it. Certainly, you don’t have the, you don’t have the population here that was there then. Many people all over town have swimming pools and have said let the neighbors use and so forth that they won’t pay the admission fees for the pool, so I think my comments are just not worth anything.
Interviewer: John, I want to thank you for coming this afternoon and Rabbit for sharing some ideas and comments with us. Again this is February 27, 1985 and we’ve been talking to John Lauderdale and Carl “Rabbit” Yearwood. Thank you both for coming down.
Transcribed: November 2005
Typed by LB